Mary Hayashi tops list of Assembly's late votes

Running for a hotly contested race for Alameda County supervisor, Assemblywoman Mary Hayashi claims her service in Sacramento has given her "a great opportunity to make a difference."

Yet her votes often came late -- after the fate of the bills had already been decided and thus made no difference.

An analysis by The Associated Press shows Hayashi, D-Hayward, added her vote to a roll call late 290 times during this year's legislative session -- far more than any other Assembly member. She also changed one vote after the official roll call.

Those 291 votes represent almost 6 percent of the 5,012 vote changes or additions made in the Assembly overall.

Critics say the practice allows lawmakers to mislead their constituents by changing the official record of how they acted on pieces of legislation.

All lawmakers in California's 80-member Assembly are allowed to change or add votes after the fate of a bill has been decided an unlimited number of times, as long as it does not change the outcome of whether a bill passes or fails. The state Senate allows such changes only by its Democratic and Republican leaders.

California's is one of at least 10 state legislative bodies nationwide in which lawmakers can amend their votes.

Hayashi's chief consultant, Ross Warren, declined to directly address her voting record in an interview with the AP, but noted that "she's always recorded a vote ... She's never missed a day of work."

Hayashi on Jan. 6 pleaded no contest to misdemeanor grand theft, based on her October 2011 arrest for shoplifting $2,450 worth of clothing from San Francisco's Neiman Marcus store; she was sentenced to three years of probation.

She said she had been distracted by a phone call when she walked out with the unpaid items. But she said she offered "apologies, not excuses" to constituents, and she trusted voters wouldn't hold it against her in November.

Hayashi is term-limited out of office this year. Her rivals for the Alameda County District 2 supervisor's seat are incumbent Richard Valle, appointed in June following Nadia Lockyer's resignation stemming from her drug addiction and extramarital affair; Union City Mayor Mark Green; and retired Alameda County sheriff's deputy Mark Turnquist.

The Bay Area's next highestnumber of added votes belonged to Jared Huffman, D-San Rafael; he never changed a vote this year but added 144 after the official roll calls.

"There's nothing political about what's going on -- I'm just working hard," said Huffman, who is also term-limited out of the Assembly this year -- and is now running to succeed Rep. Lynn Woolsey, D-San Rafael. "Sometimes I'm off in committee hearings, sometimes I'm on the floor of the Senate working in the trenches to get votes for my bills."

But he acknowledged other lawmakers might abuse the process.

"Do I have colleagues that play games with withholding their vote, entertaining cards from lobbyists and letting that sway their ultimate vote? Absolutely, I see that all the time," Huffman said, adding that he has a strict policy against talking to lobbyists during floor sessions.

Assemblywoman Nancy Skinner, D-Berkeley, added 80 votes and changed seven this year. Like Huffman, she said she sometimes must skip floor votes in order to shepherd her bills through Senate committees or on the Senate floor. Skinner also noted that she heads the Assembly Rules Committee, which sometimes must meet on procedural matters even while floor votes are happening.

Hayashi is an alternate Rules Committee member.

The AP's analysis of every Assembly vote cast in 2012 revealed a number of patterns, including:

Lawmakers running for a new seat in November were the most likely to switch their votes. Of the top 15 vote changers, 11 are seeking a new office outside of the Assembly. Of the 15 lawmakers who switched votes least often, 11 plan to stay put, although every member of the Assembly must run for their seats again this year.

Lawmakers regularly changed their votes on bills dealing with powerful lobbies or hot-button social issues. Among the bills that generated the most action after-the-fact were AB1963, which would have required the state to look into extending the sales tax to services, and AB1166, which would have prevented schools from including students' test scores on their ID cards and was supported by teachers unions.

Republicans, the minority party in both houses of the Legislature, switched their votes at more than twice the rate as Democrats. GOP lawmakers accounted for about 65 percent of the 220 vote switches, although they make up just 35 percent of the Assembly.

Some of this year's most contentious bills drew unusually high numbers of vote changes or additions once they had been voted up or down.

Examples include AB1761, legislation related to setting up California's health-care exchange, part of the federal health care overhaul, and AB1707, which will allow certain people who had been designated as child abusers when they were minors to have their names removed from a state registry.

In the case of the child-abuse bill, lawmakers of both parties may have feared the soft-on-crime label if they voted for it. In the end, most appeared to agree with its author that the change was a common-sense fix that would lift a tremendous burden from people who had been unfairly placed on the list, including foster kids who had gotten into fights.

The official tally shows 64 of the 80 Assembly members voted for the legislation. But when the bill was on the floor of the Legislature, so many members avoided voting that it passed by just a single vote, with 41 ayes.

Bob Stern, the former president of the Center for Governmental Studies in Los Angeles, said average voters have no idea their representatives reverse positions on bills or can add a "yes" or "no" vote after the legislation had been decided. The information is difficult to piece together, especially for vote additions.